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Turn Real Life Into A Cartoon
Saige writes "Ever wanted to see yourself in a cartoon? Before now, there were means to turn a single image into something cartoon-like, but some folks at Microsoft Research have come up with a method to turn a video into an animated cartoon. It's not up to doing it fully automated, as you have to hand-mark various parts of the video every 10 to 15 frames, but the video of the results is quite impressive."
My first thought-- oh, great. Put me out of work.
But then I came to my senses. Of course this kind of thing would never replace traditional animation. After all, you'd still have to have actors enact the scenes to be animated, the backgrounds would have to be set up or altered, etc. Setting up a shoot of a scene to be animated could end up being more of a PITA than just animating it to begin with. Though the end result could be a cool rotoscope/Waking Life effect, it's not a "cheat" to get an animated feature without the tedious work of animating.
That was a kickass show. I even bought the Season 4 DVD. Absolute shame it doesn't give the show a proper ending...
I have only had three "blue screens" on my wife's XP box, but the number of times that it spontaneously reboots (especially when using not-so-quick-switch)... it is mindboggling.
Like any large company, there are many different departments handling many different things.
Research is but one of those departments. And why deny them the ability to do further research? In the end, with what they've learned doing research it can only help their products that are already out in the market.
"That is (Score: +5 Slap-stick Humour), right?"
For some yes, for a lot of others, no. If XP or 2k ever caused me to lose a multi-day-long-render, you bet ur ass I'd toss it without a second thought.
"Derp de derp."
> I hate to say this, but this is a simple application of known and existing technologies. Nifty for the guys that made it, but not exactly groundbreaking.
Why does everything have to be groundbreaking?
Sometimes the most important developments are the ones that simply involve someone taking the time to put two and two together.
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants"
If it's good enough for Newton, why not these guys?
Advanced users are users too!
So basically MS is taking credit for work largely done by three Asian graduate students? Kind of like three Ph.D. students at Harvard finding a cure for AIDS, and then Harvard claiming it's their discovery.
Cohen's colleagues get zero name recognition in the MS article. Kind of awkward don't you think? It comes off as if the other workers' contributions are insignificant.
The parent is still very informative. We wouldn't have even known about the other contributors if it weren't for him.
And anyone who has worked under a big-name advisor on a project knows they have a tendency to take credit for more than they actually did, especially when foreign students are involved.
I have only had three "blue screens" on my wife's XP box, but the number of times that it spontaneously reboots (especially when using not-so-quick-switch)... it is mindboggling.
Speaking as someone who works on windows machines all day doing tech support for end users (on verticle market database frontends) I can honestly 90% of all bluescreens are caused by hardware problems or buggy device drivers.
I've had buggy device drivers kernel panic my linux box too - so its not just a windows thing.
I honestly can't remember the last time either my work pc (which runs Windows 2000) or my home pc which runs XP bluescreened.
The article was written by some tech writer as a PR piece. Cohen was the biggest name on list of people who wrote the paper. Of the other three, two appear to work for Microsoft Research in Asia and the other is a grad student who also works with Microsoft Research in Asia. Oh my God, you mean a lowly tech writer didn't give full credit but the paper did? That's absurd. Oh and if you can't find the paper yourself by going to Cohen's webpage linked in the article its Video Tooning
And by checking the authors we have Yingqing Xu and Heung-Yeung Shum as well as Cohen and Jue Wang from above. So we have 3 PhDs working for Microsoft and a doctoral student working at Microsoft doing research, and its Microsoft stealing credit?
Troll. And you have a fairly low UID compared to most I see in these threads
I/O, I/O, its off to disk I go, with a read and a write, and a bit and a byte, I/O, I/O, I/O, I/O
If you are asking me, I think Microsoft Research should not be working on animating yourself into cartoons, but rather with their operating system and its security.